Differences in gender expression and identification, as well as sexuality, will also come through your door. As a counselor, you must be welcoming of this diversity. Being appreciative of this diversity will help you be open and accepting to each client so you can give them the care they deserve. Finally, you want to make sure you are empathetic. While boundaries remain important, let your clients know your compassion and empathy for their situation.
Demonstrate your dedication to guiding them through their struggles so that they can find their way to a healthier situation. When you work to harness these important traits as a part of your training, you will find that you can greatly increase the effectiveness of your practice and the bond you form with clients.
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S, please give us a call at Post University Blog. The Qualities of a Good Counselor These soft skills and interpersonal skills of a counselor will go a long way in helping them excel in their position. Download Now. Communication skills Communication skills will play a key role in your relationship with your clients.
Patience Patience will become a critical trait as a counselor. Confidence Counselors must be confident in the services they provide and how they help clients.
Non-judgmental Counselors also regularly meet with clients who have made choices that they do not agree with. Although the specific setting may have an implied scope of practice, counselors frequently are challenged with children, adolescents, adults, or families that have multiple issues, such as mental health disorders and addiction, disability and employment needs, school problem or career counseling needs, and trauma.
Counselors must recognize these issues in order to provide their clients with appropriate counseling and support. NOTE: You should avoid asking why questions because they may elicit feelings or actions that can be complex and embarrassing.
To be a good counselor you must possess the following qualities: Patience: You need to be very patient.
Good Listening: You need to be a good listener. Observant: You need to be very observant and able to interpret non-verbal communication e. Warm: Provide non-possessive warmth in a counseling environment. But professional counselors must be able to "start where the client is at. Counselors need to be able to convey acceptance to their clients with warmth and understanding.
Counselors help people through some of the most difficult and stressful times of their lives. They must be able to display empathy — the ability to feel what another person is feeling. Empathy means that you are truly able to imagine what it's like to stand in someone else's shoes.
Compassion and empathy help your clients feel understood and heard. It's not up to a counselor to solve her clients' problems, no matter how much she might want to help. But counselors must have excellent problem-solving skills to be able to help their clients identify and make changes to negative thought patterns and other harmful behaviors that might be contributing to their issues, says Dr. Being able to make real human connections with clients can be a difficult skill to develop.
Another important skill is related to being grounded in multiculturalism and social justice. Counselors need to be both multicultural and advocacy competent in their practice.
Theories in counseling are important. However, they are often overrated. I think the therapeutic alliance is much more important than being able to apply theory in practice.
While theories in counseling are important, I believe clients benefit most when they have a real connection with their therapist. As I embarked on a career in counseling, I realized quickly that there were limits to what I could do as a counselor due to the training I received. I realized that the theories I used with clients from historically oppressed groups were often ineffective. The clients I saw also presented issues that were systemically based.
I was trained to do individual counseling and not necessarily work in communities. So, the skill I had to develop was community engagement. I found my counseling skills were useful in being able to connect with others. However, I needed to develop skills around working in the social milieu. This learning led to my passion for integrating advocacy and social justice in counseling.
Contact her at dee. A great counselor is a master counselor, a person who concentrates on being effective, not on being great. A counselor is most concerned with developing and growing as a person throughout the professional lifespan.
Being great as a counselor is feeling secure in the knowledge that I will never reach greatness but I will always strive to expand my personhood and my skills. The drive to grow is the force that inspires my desire be in relationship. Being in relationship inspires my drive to grow.
In my connection with others, I am encouraged to learn more, be more and engage more. These are essential to being a great counselor. The top three attributes for a counselor are the ones we all learned and can cite, but do we really live them?
I must be at home with myself, confident in my own skin and able to share who I am with others genuineness. I must believe in the person of the client, secure in the knowledge that my client is capable of determining personal direction unconditional positive regard.
Currently, our field encourages the overrated use of techniques with clients. Typically, these techniques have little theory or research base to support their use, yet new counselors are often sent to books full of ideas on what to do with a client. In contrast, the most underrated skill is intentionality.
Counselors should know why they are taking actions with clients: What is the intended outcome? How does this benefit the client or the therapeutic relationship? Why do I do what I do? I am always in the state of becoming, and I have experienced that the most important attribute of this state is vulnerability. Being aware and accepting of my own vulnerability immediately puts me in connection with my clients.
My acknowledgement of our common humanity is the base of my effectiveness. I work on being in relationship with my vulnerability continually. I hope that we are honest with ourselves about what makes great counseling. We have come a long way in our knowledge about the behavior and motivations of people, but this knowledge is secondary when I am sitting in a room with someone who is hurting. It is who we are as counselors that really makes the difference.
Sidney Shaw is a doctoral student in counselor education at the University of Montana. He has worked in a variety of mental health settings, including rural community mental health in Alaska, adventure-based therapy in schools and in private practice.
Contact him at sidneyleeshaw gmail. The counselor who gets systematic feedback from clients about outcomes, and helps clients achieve good outcomes, is a great counselor. Ability to elicit honest client feedback about the therapeutic relationship and whether counseling is proving helpful. Empathic understanding — specifically finding out if the client experiences the counselor as empathic. The most overrated is using the medical model approach to counseling. This means acting on the following premise: a.
Meta-analytic research clearly indicates that this model accounts for much less of the outcome in counseling than the common factors e. Thus, the most underrated is deliberately enacting the common factors. Accepting and encouraging feedback from clients — especially negative feedback — is central to client empowerment, good outcomes and counselor growth. Throughout counseling history there have been numerous trends of what counselors need to do or how they need to be in order to be helpful.
Though a framework for understanding great counseling is useful, counselors also need to be able to put those a priori assumptions aside to find out, from clients, if they are in fact being helpful. Contact her at asingh uga. This is an easy question for me to answer! Great counselors are those who make positive social justice change in their communities.
We all know that so many of the concerns clients present with are related to multicultural and social justice issues — so, we are truly at our best as counselors when we are working from a health promotion perspective both within and outside the walls of our offices. The first is not a skill or attribute or maybe it is : going to a counselor yourself. I had one of the best feminist counselors myself, and I learned more than any class could teach me about the actual practice of counseling.
Third, we must be prepared to act when we identify injustices in the world. This is a funny question! Culturally, sometimes this is the worst thing you can do in a session. The most underrated skill is our ability to understand that the constructs of Western models of counseling — empathy, authenticity, congruence, positive regard — are all culture-bound. So, we must consistently push ourselves to new learning about the many and varied cultural conceptions of wellness across cultures.
The majority of clients I work with are transgender youth and people of color, so much of the counseling centers around naming the injustices — such as transprejudice and racism — that influence their well-being. I am so grateful for the skills and lessons I learned and experienced as a result of engaging in street activism.
These skills were advocacy, group work, community-building and consciousness-raising. I believe these are the great elements of counseling! Contact him at john. Great counselors have a wide variety of attributes and skills; because clients are unique, a great counselor for one client and problem may not be a great counselor for a different client and problem. That being said, great counselors are deeply and authentically interested in the welfare of others, able to communicate effectively with clients from diverse cultural and individual backgrounds, able to be relatively nonjudgmental, and knowledgeable of empirically supported or evidence-based approaches — including knowledge about evidence-based relationships.
The most overrated skill is any skill that gets in the way of counselors developing and maintaining positive therapeutic relationships with clients. One of the most underrated skills is the skill or trait of humility. Just as we should practice multicultural humility, we should also do as Adler suggested and not strive too much to perform or prove ourselves to our clients.
We should win them over by adopting a friendly, helpful and optimistic demeanor, and be humble and not overconfident in our ability to be helpful. This has required me to look deeply at myself and recognize that what sounds good to me or what I think might be helpful may not be a good fit for the unique client who is sitting in the room with me. My answers to these questions are and will always be in process.
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